The reason this happened is that while Sinofsky had the maniacal power and force of will of a Steve Jobs, he lacked Jobs' best gift: An innate understanding of good design. Windows 8 is not well-designed. It's a mess. But Windows 8 is a bigger problem than that. Windows 8 is a disaster in every sense of the word.

This is not open to debate, is not part of some cute imaginary world where everyone's opinion is equally valid or whatever. Windows 8 is a disaster. Period.

Paul Thurrott shares some of his inside information, and it's pretty damning. According to him, Sinofsky's team - even up to his major supporter, Steve Ballmer - were removed from the company after it became clear just much of a disaster Windows 8 was.

I agree with his conclusion: razor-sharp focus on productivity, Windows' number one use. The desktop side of Windows 8.x is pretty good as it is, and has been progressively getting better with every update. I would go one step further than Thurrott. Windows 9 (desktops/laptops) and Windows Metro (tablets/smartphones). These two can still be one product (e.g., connect a keyboard/mouse/monitor to your x86 smartphone and it opens the desktop), but they should be entirely separate environments.

Someone brought up KDE/Gnome. The key is that it is an either-or. I can get most linux distros as either, or maybe even both with xfce, ldxe, and a few others, but it doesn't try to mix and match.

Google didn't reinvent Linux, they adopted and added a layer.

Windows ended up as a two-headed monster, in such a way that you needed both heads. Maybe requiring two monitors would have helped. Right now to use the old Dr Jekyll, the other UI must hide. (has no one thought of a Metro window?).

Another problem is on the developer side. Just as Apple is objective C, Microsoft is C#. It was their answer to Java (when they couldn't pollute it to be windows only). But that makes a walled garden. Much of as is a core which has the important and critical parts. That requires to be recoded thrice.

Blackberry might stage a comeback since they run apks.

Speaking of ecosystems, the XBOX is not WPhony is not PC (and the attempt at ARM whatevers the surface was supposed to be). Hawaii, the Galapaos Islands and New Zealand are not collectively an "ecosystem".